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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 62.4 (2001) 465-468



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Review

Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion


Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion. By Julie Ellison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xi + 229 pp.

The opening pages of Cato's Tears are exhilarating. Ellison announces: "The project of this book is to investigate the cultural history of public emotion. This undertaking itself arises from a long-standing conjunction between civic claims and the language of sympathy. The current willingness of academics to address issues of emotion has been shaped by a national political mood that is both troubled and fascinated by a sentimental agenda" (2-3). The sentimental agenda of the 1990s is, particularly, "the politics of liberal guilt" (9), and Ellison aims to trace this politics back through the long eighteenth century. Her terminus a quo is, intriguingly, literature produced during the English Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81--Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus, Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, Otway's Venice Preserved--and her terminus ad quem is the Barbary and Tripolitan Wars (1801-15) and the American publication of Barbary captivity narratives. This "circum-Atlantic" eighteenth-century history (or prehistory) of liberal guilt is intended to illuminate the "masculine sensibility" that is too often forgotten, at least in the "rich scholarly conversation on American sensibility" in which Ellison situates herself--largely, by her own account, a conversation among women academics about nineteenth-century women authors. We are told, or reminded, that "sensibility as a cultural ethos took shape in England . . . as part of the culture of elite men with an affinity for republican narratives and parliamentary opposition" (8-9). Within this elite Ellison finds as a precondition of liberal guilt (before liberalism) an obsession, variously regulated, with "vicarious pain" (10). Sympathetic interest in the pain of others extends downward and outward during what is ordinarily called the Age of Sensibility, until one finds in the protagonist of Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) someone who feels the pain of faraway East Indians mistreated by troops employed by the British East India Company (12-14).

There is, however, a structural oddity about Cato's Tears: little more is actually said about liberal guilt between the book's introduction and its conclusion, [End Page 465] in which Ellison explores the question of liberal guilt in the 1990s, cogently and con amore--but with no substantial reference to the intervening six chapters. The alpha and omega of this book fit together so nicely because Ellison's introduction and conclusion draw on the same article, "A Short History of Liberal Guilt," originally published in Critical Inquiry (1996). The problem with Cato's Tears as a whole is that it is not really "a long history of liberal guilt"; indeed, it has little continuous argument or articulated narrative. Its disjunctiveness reflects but was not necessitated by its deep roots in previously published materials, a full six of its eight chapters (counting the introduction and conclusion) being no strangers to this world.

The first two numbered chapters--"Conspiracy, Sensibility, and the Stoic" and "Cato's Tears"--go together fairly well, sharing a focus on what Ellison identifies as the typical familial plot of republican or Roman plays of the late Stuart era. In this plot, a stern, Stoic, republican father (or father figure) lays down the law, which a sensitive son (or son substitute) obeys, ambivalently. Of Addison's Cato (1713) Ellison concludes, "The virtuous son's dilemma suggests that ambivalent sensibility is fundamental both to legitimizing and to criticizing postmonarchical forms of power" (58; cf. 36). Ellison uncovers in these chapters a dialectic of Stoic self-command and sympathetic response that seems to inform republican intersubjectivity; one wishes only that she had connected it more explicitly to her earlier thesis about "vicarious pain" and the evolution of liberal guilt.

Meanwhile, Ellison argues for the crucial role of race in Cato, in which the sensitive son figure is the North African prince, Juba: "The staging of Roman and African styles of...

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